


Madness is Catching

by Soubrettina



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Iceburns, Madness, Non-Graphic Violence, Prison, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-12 04:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2096529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soubrettina/pseuds/Soubrettina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a year of everyone avoiding the decision, Elsa has decided what to do with her extremely difficult-to-handle prisoner.</p><p>Hans is exactly as tragic- or not- as the reader chooses to believe he is. (Possibly Hans/Elsa, if you're looking for it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

As he is sitting on the bunk with his head bowed, slumped right down into himself, Elsa can see the rope-burn on the side of his neck, still an angry purple against that near-translucent white skin, almost as fair as her own.

“I think you know that that was unworthy of you, Prince Hans.”

He doesn’t respond, though she sees his lip curl at the evocation of the dignity of his birth. So much the better.

The reminder of his capacity for brutality is almost welcome- it never helped to let that skin draw her attention- the reminder that Hans was in fact barely older than she was, known everywhere as someone's kid brother (and so really shouldn’t have been proposing to anyone without at least telling King Magnus first- she could only have imagined he was trying to tie Anna’s reputation to his own before Magnus and herself could compare notes about him), or of the reports that he’d been a sickly child, and still burst out in red wheals on contact with hay.

“I don’t believe you were in that much distress. Any more than you’d done it out of unbearable remorse.”

At long last he raises his head and smirks at her. _Good_. She’s probably- _probably_ \- getting the real Hans Westergard, or- she is starting to suspect- the nearest thing that exists to a real Hans Westergard. Over the last year she’s met so many. The valiant gentleman who’d not realised that he’d taken the wrong approach and had only meant to save the country might have washed for a while, particularly when he excused his fierce manner as a desperation to avenge/save his dead/dying bride (part of the problem being the way the story tended to slip.) It might have been convincing if said bride had not, against everyone’s expectations, been very much alive and, not incidentally, furious at his having deserted her.

(Actually it was Olaf, of all people, who had helped Elsa stitch together what had taken place- Olaf was not good at keeping up with events but he was certainly sensitive to Anna’s moods. Strangely, Elsa could let go the sound of a sword unsheathing behind her head, but the picture of Anna- already dying- broken-hearted and bewildered, full of self-recrimination- for that, there were no excuses.)

Then she’d seen again the innocent, rather silly young man who had so endeared Anna in the first place, who had cracked open to reveal something monstrous- raging and threatening, insinuating obscene things about the queen’s nature, about her sister, her father, her parentage, and notions about the provenance of her magic that the Duke of Westleton had never thought of.

(Westleton, meanwhile, had pleasingly proved both as pathetic and as stupid as he looked; he’d not liked Hans from the start for being too benevolent, but what had really stung him was having been cheated into condescending to pity and console the man over the loss of Anna.

“He was acting all alone! I had no _thought_ , did not _imagine_ for one moment that he had designs on your Majesty’s crown! The man’s a scoundrel! He’s vicious, pernicious and meretri- pernicious, malicious, capricious and- vicious, terretric- he’s a _swine_!”)

That had been the first week.

A month later he’d been sent back again, preceded by a missive from King Magnus declaring that his brother had not committed his crimes in the Southern Isles but if Queen Elsa wished him to stand trial her neighbour would not hide him from justice.

Unfortunately Hans in the intermediary had found a new persona, who would go for days refusing food, had screaming nightmares and burst into tears of terror and anguish at unpredictable moments.

Autumn had been drawing in by then, the weather uncertain, bringing everyone indoors and rapidly closing the season for sailing. The castle should have been big enough for a single prisoner not to be shredding the nerves of everyone present, but a prince of a neighbouring kingdom- even if said kingdom seemed to have lost all interest in him- was not the sort of prisoner one could lock away and forget about.

Elsa herself didn’t care for what she named to other people as ‘German doctors’, men who called themselves ‘nerve specialists’ and that she thought of, secretly, as ‘crazy doctors’- not since Anna had been absent one day when Elsa had found herself all iced up, when Kai had panicked and called Dr Hoffman, who had summoned three specialists who had shone lights in her eyes, taken samples of her fingernails and asked her a lot of impertinent questions about everything from her cycle to the patterns of her ice and how she’d felt about Papa to where the name Olaf came from (she really had no idea.)

So she wondered if there was a stab of vindictive pleasure in inflicting Hans on each one in turn- though if so it had backfired, they were fascinated by him, and he’d seemed to enjoy the attention. Or at least he had until he had been sent back to his brothers on their advice.

“You realise,” she says now, “it rather gives strength to what your brothers have been claiming?”

He sighs, a flicker in that unpleasant grin.

“I know." It sounds clenched and painful- his exertions last night must have hurt his throat, though he was not much the worse for them otherwise. "Poor… what was that word? _unbalanced_ Hans. Some sort of sad monster, to be locked away.”

“Oh, come now. Nobody used the word ‘ _poor_ ’.”

That gets a brief flicker of amusement, which fits with how he’d been when he arrived yesterday- gently mocking, familiar, facetious, flirtatious even, entering the main courtyard like a strolling player (“I’m back! Any mail?”), and side-tracking Elsa’s conversation like an old friend, complimenting every sign of returning health, congratulating her on Anna’s engagement. It had distracted from the fact that he’d kept his greatcoat on, which even in the cells seemed rather hot for early summer; presumably that was where he’d been hiding the stolen ship’s rope that he’d used to string himself up from the beams.

The greatcoat looked shabby, and the uniform under it- the same one in which he’d been pulled out of the harbour and arrested a year ago- is a dead loss- now grey, all the embellishments frayed, noticeably too big for him now.

Round, green, _young_ eyes turn up at Elsa, dilated in the poor light, surprisingly blank, the expression oddly- unpleasantly- familiar- reminding her of cold iron shackles and desperate protestations to stop asking of her what she couldn’t give.

Really, it should put her off these interviews altogether. Madness would seem to be catching (but who had caught it from who?)

“Is that why you did it?” she asks, as gently as she can.

“What? For fear of going back?” His hand covers the welt again; does his voice have a faint shiver of forced casualness in it, or is that deliberate? “I can’t say I fancy it. Shut up for good, great-nephews uncertain whether I was real or something their parents made up to scare them…” A really visible shudder this time. _Interesting_.

“The _invisible_ Hans?”

“Please. _Don’t_.” He turns and gazes abstractly at the window. “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to talk about that kind of thing.”

“They didn’t. Anna talked about it. It was true, then, what you told Anna?”

He gives her his loveable-rogue smile.

“I lie a lot less than you think I do, you know. You’ve got to be strategic. One can’t go round saying the grass is pink. People aren't _completely_ stupid.”

“Why d’you really do it, Hans?”

He waved a cavalier hand.

“You weren't going to. Neither you nor Magnus dared to put your name to it. It never looks good, does it, to hang a prince? I suppose I've got _that_ left.”

“You couldn't stand any more… anticipation?”

“Well done for not saying ‘suspense’. I think I was just… bored of waiting, to tell you the truth.”

“You hanged yourself out of _boredom_? “

“Well, it gave me something to do for an hour. And I’m not overly inclined to make Arandelle look good, under the circumstances. Letting people say you drove me to it…”

“A pyrrhic victory, Hans.”

“True.”

“You didn’t really want to die, did you? Hung up in a cell like some common wretch, never mentioned in polite company again. That’s not your style. You wanted me down here, all concerned and guilty and fussing over you.”

“Now you’re just making it all about _yourself_.” Then suddenly he’s sitting forward on the bunk, almost pressing against her, looking almost straight up at her, and Elsa strains her ears to make sure the guards are close outside- she doesn’t really want to ice-burn him again, not after last time when he’d carried on squeezing and they had to call Kristoff to unstick his fingers from her face- a bottle of vodka and a guard outside to hold back a screaming Anna- it hadn’t been pleasant having to brush fragments of his skin off hers. “It could be that way, you know- perhaps I’m not noticing it, but… you know, you’re a very beautiful woman, Elsa.”

“You can stop that right away.”

“I don’t even mean it like that. You know how different you seem, these days? There’s moments you glow, you know that? No, not literally, I mean in your expression, in your eyes, in your voice… I just can’t imagine what it’s like with you and your sister. I know you made yourself a living snowman the shape of a child, when someone made of snow was the only thing you could hold. There’s something that comes off you the way that the cold used to do-“

He reaches out for her, and she almost doesn’t skip back in time.

“Hans, this is the trouble with being a confirmed liar.”

“Yes.” He sighs. “Yes it is. Too late.” He looks up again at the beams. “ _To hell with it…_ ”

“Stop it. I didn’t come down to fuss over you.”

“Of course not-“

“I came down to sentence you.”

“…oh.”

_Didn’t see that coming, did you?_

“I assume you know of the mines in Selki Island?”

“Of course, your Majesty… I mean, Arendelle’s a beautiful country, but I wasn’t trying to usurp you for its interesting glacial valleys.”

Elsa declined to disagree, though she was faintly incredulous that Hans had such a concept as something being beneath stealing.

The mines _had_ been lucrative. They might soon be again… if it were possible to work on them before the end of the summer.

“A bear,” she explained. “Or it seems to be a single bear. Nobody knows where it makes its den, they can walk for leagues, swim too. It seems to be a single bear because it’s so _big_ , almost twice the usual size and completely unafraid of men. In fact it seems to have a taste for men. It came nightly until half the mining towns had to be abandoned. There’s even stories that it wears armour, although that seems unlikely. But it is like something from a saga. Only this isn’t a saga. Arandelle is a modern nation through those mines, as I’m sure you know well.” She didn’t wait for whatever answer that solicited, but when she looked, she need not have worried. Hans looked spellbound. “Yesterday a mine foreman came to me- his men want to work, but they are not warriors. He cannot ask them to work under this horror. It came to me, it was like a monster, it needed Beowulf, or Sigurd… and then an image came back to me.” She turned on him a smile that she had already had practised.

She hadn’t known what to expect.

She certainly hadn’t expected to see a man suddenly so tremblingly, dazedly _happy_.

“You mean…”

“ _Yes_.”

“I… my sword…”

She went to the door.

“Bring it in, Aksel.”

A guard came in, bearing…

“But… but it… you _didn’t_.”

Aksel approached the bunk, and offered Prince Hans the handle of the sword. He drew it with a hand that only trembled slightly; and if Elsa shuddered at the sound of it being unsheathed again, she barely noticed to see his gaze run up the re-forged blade.

And then his expression sag a little.

“This hasn’t been done very well, you know.”

“Sorry. It was the best we could do.”

 

***

 

“He accepted, then?” Kristoff said, as she sat down to dinner. She must have looked sufficiently pleased that the subject spoke for itself.

“His freedom for the head of the great bear, yes. _Without the bear attached._ He leaves tomorrow, the boat will put him down and… we’ll see.”

Anna sniffed, and gave her attention over completely to dropping bread-pills in her soup. A princess really ought to have known better, but she didn’t, and why should she? Kristoff put his spoon down and gave Elsa one of his resigned-to-mad-royals looks.

“He’s going to get killed, isn’t he?”

“Very probably.”

“He’s going to get _horribly_ killed. There won’t be anything left to bury.”

Anna made a sound like: “ _Hmph_!”, which everyone tactfully ignored.

“Of course he is. He’s not going to die old in a sanatorium; he’s going to make a completely mad last stand against a ravening monster. It’s absolutely impossible… completely impossible… and yet…”

Elsa couldn’t stop the smile from creeping up on her. _Glowing_ , indeed.

Kristoff shook his head.

“Madness,” he said. “It’s catching!”


	2. Return of a Free Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part two, four months later.

It was when evening was starting to make itself known, a few weeks past midsummer- the nights had actually started going fully dark for a few brief hours- when Kristoff came home (for it had, without him noticing, become ‘home’) to find Anna waiting on the steps, appearing to vibrate like a taught string. The shadows of the wall fall across her feet, but her gleaming hair is still lit up rose-gold in the gloom.

Her bounding down the steps demanding to know what had taken him so long was usual, although his having to go in and find her was happening more often now and they were none the worse for it- but this urgent and persistent _waiting_ had a meaning to it. Sven agreed, from the way he bounded up to her and stood, staring at her in expectation.

“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on Sven to stop him attempting to but the answer out of her (he’d never done it with Anna yet, but still) “what’s wrong?”

“Guess who’s dead?”

“Guess who’s dead?” The question expanded ripples of weirdness. “I don’t know, any number of people are dead.”

“Shut up.”

That really isn’t like her.

“I’m sorry. Who is it?”

“Hans.”

“What?”

“Hans! _Hans_ Hans.”

 _Oh well now she’s repeated it…_ he doesn’t say that, though.

“Yes, I know who you mean.”

“Of course you know who I mean, I…”

She swallows whatever the next word was, and puts her hand over her mouth, staring at him with her face all full of _strangeness_.

What, even now?

Oh, he’s not jealous, exactly, not like that. He knows Anna lost all attachment she might have had to his highness as soon as the creep- the deformed sick inadequate waste of flesh and skin- had laughed at her for having thought that they were in love. But he does know that the wound didn’t completely heal over right- that for all Anna’s appearance of endless resilience, the hurt is still somewhere deep down inside her and just occasionally threatens to blister up again whenever she remembers it. Like now.

“Alright, I’m sorry. Come here, then.”

She falls into his arms easily enough, swaddled so completely it almost feels like he could wrap around again to make another layer; and from here he can feel her trembling. Trust Anna to start trembling _now_ , but he thinks he gets it. Actual danger means nothing to Anna, but she’s still shaken by the things that Hans makes her _think_.

 “The _Gertrud_ has come back from Jadskar, they were told some of the mountain men had been up there. They’d found an enormous bear with no head on it and they handed over… a bundle of stuff- there’s broken bits of sword and bow and a belt buckle, and a very worn and bloody silk glove… and some bones. Human bones. All wrapped up in bits of a grey coat, and, and it’s edged with brocade of waves that some of our guards recognised.” She swallows a bit. “Apparently there were a lot of fox tracks around, which explains why there isn’t… isn’t any more left.”

“Alright, alright. Deep breaths.”

“I’m… I’m…”

“Sh-ssh. You don’t _have_ to be okay.” He manages to get a look down at her face, where she’s fitted, easily now, against him. She looks pale and lost, though perhaps she’s just a bit nauseated.

Sven grunts at her, and sticks his lips against her ear, which makes her, if not smile, then let the lines of her face relax a little. Her weight is on him now, and her eyes are closed, like she intends to sleep there for the night, which would be very nice if he could stand on the spot until morning. As he can’t, he presses a kiss into the top of her head, just as the shadows cover them.

“You can cry if you like, you know.”

“I’m not gonna _cry!_ After all he did-“ She gets choked up again for a moment. “I really don’t want to. I don’t want to be sorry he’s dead, but… I can’t hate a bunch of bones. He just _had_ to put himself beyond hating, didn’t he?”

“Comes to everyone, in the end.”

“You’re telling me?” She pulls her head up. “Yeah, that’s a thought. I still pre-deceased him, and he wasn’t sorry for _me_. I can think what I like.”

There’s no answer to that, so he kisses her forehead, her nose, and her mouth, though stops when he realises Sven is giving him a Look, and he doesn’t even know about the guards on the edge of his vision.

* * *

Elsa’s still sitting in the parlour, her accustomed place in the window-seat where it’s cool, with her knitting- a good gauge of how she is- calm enough to use her hands, too distracted to read- though it’s more obvious when she puts it down at once when Anna comes in.

“There you are. Have you been pacing about the castle all this time?”

“I was standing out there waiting for Kristoff. He was late.”

Kristoff looked at Elsa apologetically.

“I didn’t say a time.”

“Well, you were later than I thought you’d be.”

Elsa took Anna’s hand in one of hers- strokes it a little too warily.

“You’re cold.” Kristoff can see her expression- her firm elder-sister face just about masking her real worry.

“Only because I was standing around outside. I’m fine.”

“Really?” Elsa’s eyes stray to Kristoff, looking for confirmation.

“Really. I’m going to find dinner for Kristoff.”

“Did you eat by yourself?”

“I… I’m not really hungry tonight.”

That seemed to be permission enough for Elsa to get up out of the chair and put her arms round Anna, squeezing out of the words: “I told you, I’m _fine…_ ”

“Of course you’re fine.”

Kristoff can’t see Anna’s face, but tell from her posture that her eyes are cast down again.

“Is it really all over, now?”

“Not quite. I’ve had to write to Princess Margareta-“

“Princess Margareta?”

“Hans’ niece, King Magnus’ eldest daughter; she’s about your age. Hans left a will naming her as his next of kin. I think she’s the nearest relative he doesn- didn’t actively dislike. I’ve said I’ll receive members of the family if they want to come to take back his body.”

Anna groaned.

“Is this going to end in an official reception?”

“A quiet one, I promise. The Westergårds might have let me do whatever I would with Hans but I doubt we’re expected to hold a ball about it.”

“Do we have to do anything? It was an execution. We don’t owe it to _him_.”

“Yes, I realise that. But the bargain I gave him was to kill the bear, for his freedom, which he did. Distasteful though the idea is, he was a free man; fortunately all he seems to have done with that freedom was to die from the wounds he sustained in winning it. He’s therefore free to be buried as himself, not as a criminal. So we can commiserate Princess Margareta on that unfortunate loss, the Westergårds don’t offend us by commemorating him as an unfortunate one of their own, and everyone’s happy.”

“Except Hans?”

“Given that the choice appeared to be between locking him up in an asylum or death by beheading, I’m not sure even Hans comes out of it too badly.”

“Elsa, I don’t _mind_ Hans coming out of it badly.”

“I’m afraid it’s late for that now.”

* * *

In fact there are only two of them, after the servants and secretaries; though surprisingly enough King Magnus was one. Perhaps it was to supervise his daughter.

“No,” Elsa says. “It’s to put an end to any suggestion of bad blood between us.”

“Bad blood? I thought he sent those shipments of grain last winter as reparation.”

“I think it was strictly an unofficial gesture. Be careful, you’ll drop your flowers.”

Anna tries to pull her cloak over more of her dress- the deep doorway of the castle isn’t quite keeping the hammering rain off her, nor the armful of lilies she was carrying.

“And the lilies are an official gesture?”

“They’re an official gesture to Margareta. Which will be rather spoiled if you drop them in a puddle first.”

 “They’re dripping.” Anna gives them a vigorous shake, spraying water over the courtyard, which naturally doesn’t look to good when the visiting party enters the castle gates.

In a small crowd of servants and clerks is a tall man, looking up to give them a gentle smile as he’s tilted sideways holding a futile umbrella over a pale girl who was fighting against the wilting weather, weighed down as she was in a collapsed hat and a streaming mantle and having to heave her skirts spreading heavy behind her through over the stream running against her over the castle courtyard cobbles.

When they come up the steps it seems she’s taller than Elsa, despite the weight her skirts, the far end of which is still in the courtyard. King Magnus removes his hat for the ladies and everyone curtseys to everyone else, except for the gentlemen of course. Anna doesn’t really know how to look when she thrusts out her lilies (she just can’t look empathically sad- she just _can’t_ insult someone with a lie like that) , but she gets a smile followed by Margareta lifting her eyes to hers even against the water pouring down from her coiffure. And her eyes are large, unusually round, and a peculiar shade of green that’s almost golden. Anna just about manages not to shudder.

Margareta’s now sitting with a whole sofa to herself- her skirts spread out quite a long way and nobody really wants them dragged over their feet. Her ramrod posture may be one of impeccable deportment, or it may be formidable corseting- like her uncle she tapers sharply from the shoulders, and the black-gloved hands still politely clinging to the bouquet as she shivers are surprisingly large. But the braids looped round her ears and rolled up in a chignon are dully brown, and must take her rosy mouth full of big white teeth from her mother, and that almost distracts from the prominent cheekbones in that pale, spare face, with the long, mobile eyebrows; and she’s s very quiet, and keeps those eyes mostly on her flowers.

Anna hadn’t been sure how she expected King Magnus to be, but whatever it had been, it wasn’t it. He was neither hard-faced nor brooding, nor gross and noisy. He was admittedly possessed of a beak-like nose, but with the vague half-smile and bright eyes that went with it he looked vague and friendly, like a man who never thought beyond the next hunting-trip. He’s fussed over his daughter rather a lot- peeling off her mantle, carrying her train, spreading blankets on the sofa- all in words of concern for Queen Elsa’s furnishings, but he follows it with:

“-don’t look so embarrassed, Sternchen. You were given the office, I’m here to attend you; you have to be magnificent and you’re still doing it very well.”

“I f-feel a f-fool.”

She looks so pathetic it doesn’t seem fair for Anna to stay silent.

“It happens in Arendelle, see. Even in the ordinary way of things we get some lively weather. You should see what’s happened to some of my dresses. Of course Elsa would tell you that I manage to find something to do to them whatever the weather does, but that’s the view of someone who puts everything in dust-covers, so I open her wardrobe and it’s like a row of lavender ghosts. Ghosts that are light purple, I mean, not the ghost of some dead lavender, haunting my sister’s drawers. I mean, the drawers she keeps her things in, not, not, I’ll pour the tea.”

Kindly saving Anna from further blunders, Margareta sneezes.

“Hey. You’re not catching a cold, are you, Meta?”

“I th-think the water’s warming up, Father.”

“Suit yourself. Don’t sit there tragically catching your death on your Uncle Hans’ account, whatever you do. Though I suppose a slight sniffle would look well at the funeral. I don’t think there’s anyone else who’ll have one.”

“Will there be a lot of people to see?”

“Of course. It’s still a public occasion.”

“I’m sure we can all bear the grief will dignity and fortitude, Father.”

“Yes. Dignified grief goes down very well with the nobility; especially when they can all gather round for it.”

“Will they? I didn’t know Hans had so many friends.”

“Don’t be silly, Meta, it’s not about friendship, it’s about allies, or at least potential ones. Wonderful thing, a death. So uncontroversial. I can rely on you to look after the ladies, I know.”

“Why can’t they be with their husbands?”

“Their husbands will be busy.”

“Only during the funeral.”

“Darling child, they’re not coming for the funeral, they’re coming for the politics. This is a _working_ funeral. Are you alright there, Princess Anna? Oh, think nothing of it, why have a saucer if it doesn’t do anything? A funeral can be far better than an official assembly; there are no expectations so you can actually have meaningful discussions. In fact at that funeral in Burgundy, Wesselton the Younger and I were so busy discussing wool prices we forgot to go to the cathedral.  Have you drafted the service yet, by the way?”

“Mostly.”

“Well, make sure you have plenty of music.”

“That would be nice, Father.”

“You see, you can have useful discussions while the organ’s playing. You have to shut up for the lesson and the prayers. Hans has at least died at the perfect time, really. So much bickering to be laid aside after last summer- with respect, Princess Anna.”

“I understand, your majesty. It all sounds just like what Hans would have wanted.”

Actually what Anna doesn’t understand is why she’s not followed her impulse to run out of the room or just scream. It must be because Margareta looks enough like Elsa just before she starts getting frosted over that Anna at least doesn’t want to upset her. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to give the impression that she’s crying over Hans (which she never has), even though for the first time since she unfroze there reallyis something to cry about.

Fortunately it’s then that Olaf comes in to check out the newcomers and introduce himself.  Sometimes a warm hug was best from someone who was eager to give you one anyway.

* * *

At least at dinner she has Elsa there, occupying the head of the table in serious and patriotic purple, probably oblivious to how the sight of her shoulders bared by the deep wide collar is making every other woman shiver on the clinging-cold evening.  It’s somebody else to make conversation, which Elsa does- thank goodness for Elsa’s long hours shut away alone with her books, honing her spookily well-ordered memory- by asking after the health and progress of a seemingly endless list of Westergårds one by one; and Margareta is just as forthcoming, seeing as every name has something to follow it, a visit somewhere, trouble with a new baby or a vaccination, a garden improved on or learning to read or to ride; that takes them from soup to fruit quite painlessly, as it brings Margareta to life as herself instead of as a funereal envoy. All the Westergårds seem to have some kind of occupation and it became gradually clear that Margareta’s was in teaching them to her little brothers and her swarm of cousins.

“Eight little brothers,” she clarifies, with the trace of a smile, “and a twin sister. I used to take them all out for long walks in the morning, but only the two little ones will get up early now. They’re just about getting the hang of flying a kite; only Fjodor’s so tiny that if it’s the least bit blowy I have to hold him still.”

“Is it often blowy?” Anna says.

“Oh yes. The deer park round the summer palace is on the nearest thing the islands have to hills, and all the islands get the wind that comes straight off the sea and carries on to the next. It’s notorious for wind. We export wind. There are wind mines.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. I was being hyperbolic.”

“…oh.”

There’s another silence, in which there can be heard footsteps in the corridor.

“I remember this about the castle now,” Magnus says, “it’s built before the idea of servants’ doors. The staff aren’t hidden away, everyone gets to walk in the same halls. I do believe if your majesty or Princess Anna came to Samsborg you’d be struck by the squeamishness of the architect. It’s like he had to pretend that the rooms mysteriously tidied themselves. Seems to be built to make sure staff know their place and we don’t see what the staff see. Unless we’re young Hans and develop a fascination with back passages.” He looks up at the _clunk_ of Elsa- Elsa!- dropping her fork and splattering cherries across the table. “I believe I should change the subject.”

“No, Father,” Margareta sighs. “Now you’ve started I believe you should elaborate.”

“What, about Hans running feral for eight months? He must have been, oh, eight, nine. Disappeared into the backstairs one night and for eight months all you’d see would be a quick glimpse of him disappearing from a room as soon as anyone came into it, but for a skittering inside the walls at nights. The nanny gave up in the end and would just leave sandwiches out for him at the back of the library, unless she could bait him out to force a bath on him. Every so often the maids would find a nest in an attic somewhere and return all the spare clothes and books that he’d stolen recently. When the summer came he moved into the park somewhere, and moved around between the follies. Until a new tutor came who tracked him down and finally gave him a good beating, and that was the end of that. Still, seemed to do him good. He’d grown nearly six inches and it was the first time I’d ever seen him without a cold.”

In sympathy, Margareta sneezed.

* * *

The coffin is undecorated but for a brass plaque, which just about accommodates the words _ADM Prince Hans Gregor Albrecht Brynjolf Westerg_ _ård von de Sydlig-Øer._

(“I know,” he’d said, or at least the Hans Anna had met at the coronation had met and mistaken for the real one had said. “It’s long and a little ridiculous, like my face.”)

Anna doesn’t want to see- the whole idea has been making her go cold and feel sick all week. But in a way, that’s why she’s here. She’d rather know than imagine it forever.

When the lid is lifted, she presses her fingernails into her palms, and… and there it is. And really, there’s not a lot. The coffin has mostly been filled with padding just to lay the few bones out on, so few it’s hard to tell whether they’re straight or not- a collar bone, a few ribs and back bones, two bones of an arm and a few hand bones, the top half of a skull; were the bones not a fresh off-white, he could have been dead for hundreds of years. He looks so _small_ ; the pommel of the sword, with a few inches of broken blade, lies about where his stomach was- it seems ludicrous that he could ever have lifted it.

She’s so amazed that she turns around wondering what’s missing when she hears the thud of Margareta hitting the floor.

A foreign princess collapsing in a castle when two countries are trying to bury a hatchet over the coffin of a prince is a matter to be taken seriously- two doctors worth of seriously. It’s worth it, even when they come down and confirm it was the result of combining high emotion with wet socks and tight-lacing sending all the blood to her feet.

Though their time wasn’t entirely wasted. It was only natural that King Magnus had been pacing up and down waiting for them and it was only in sympathetic distress that Queen Elsa had managed to freeze the floor.

His ankle isn’t broken, and neither is the _entente_ , in fact by the time the doctors leave he’s trying to soothe Elsa even as she stands by the footstool trying to see how her powers can help with the swelling.

“You’re worse than my daughter. _She’s_ only upset because she couldn’t make everything perfect. She will insist she has no romantic idea of redeeming her uncle, but because she keeps all the younger ones in line, she counts that as her only failure. It’s not her fault she’s another of his missed chances…”

As perhaps the last of those ‘missed chances’, Anna feels she probably has leave not to listen to this. They don’t see her go, and- despite those honest old-fashioned corridors- not even the long red one with the shiny, slidy floor- she meets nobody on the way back to the anteroom where Hans, or what’s left of Hans, is laid out.

Where the doctors still are. Arguing. Sort of. One whispers: “ _Are you insisting that nobody will notice?”_ And the other- Dr. Hoffman, Anna thinks, the family doctor, replies: “ _Not where it is. Not a layman.”_

They fall quiet, and Anna realises she must have been heard. She carries on, upstairs,. Whatever mysteries Hans has sprung from beyond the grave, or at least while waiting for the grave, she is determined to ignore.


	3. Caskets and Headcases

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna is ready for this all to be over. Any time now.

The dingy light that Anna goes to bed by isn’t helping, for it was just the same. Just the same as when another lone figure in black walked up that corridor- smaller, much smaller, a far simpler figure than cut by Margareta, and the corridor had been far colder- maybe, on reflection, because Elsa had been on the far side of one of those doors, or maybe because the place was so very empty.

_It’s not fair. Not fair that I meant it and she doesn’t. Not fair that she looks the same, but has no idea… no idea! Even Elsa-!_

Anna lays her forehead down in her hands on her vanity table. _Stop it. Stop all that_. She manages to conjure a picture of Kristoff, when she’d pressed him on the subject of what came before the trolls and there had been nothing in the little that he remembered that sounded good. At least the servants had been there to keep Anna safe and well-fed.

When they’d had the conversation a few months ago, Kristoff had been surprisingly blasé about it, or at least had carried on driving the sled.

“Why are you looking guilty like that? You didn’t know me then.”

“I know but… well, with going to the funeral and everything, you know, alone, and not being able to see Elsa and worrying about whether I could do anything for her…  I’ve felt, well, you know, pretty sad sometimes; but then when you say that I think I had a whole castle and the servants and everything, and- and, when you say how it was for you I think- maybe I shouldn’t have done.”

“No, no, don’t go down that road. Seriously, it’s not a competition, right? I had it hard one way, you get different problems. Like, I was very small and didn’t have to stand up in public and be polite to people about it, right?”

“I guess.”

“And I was alone, but then I didn’t have an Elsa to deal with.”

At that Anna pushed herself under his arm.

“I’d still choose Elsa. Elsa was always worth it.”

“Of course she is.”

“You’re good with her, you know that?”

“There’s no need to make your sister sound like a baby. I don’t _do_ anything for her.”

“Yes you do. She’s vulnerable and you help her feel okay.” She snuggled her face against him, breathing in the smell of leather and lanolin and pine and, well, reindeer and more than a suspicion of under-washed man, and it was wonderful. “And you make me feel okay. Better than okay.”

“Mm-hmm. Can I make you feel okay some other time, when I’m not driving?”

“Oh, promises, promises-“

Anna sits up sharply out of her reverie because that was the point that they’d hit a rock, or a tree-root, or something, and come to a very un-erotic collision of heads.

She watches the river of rain that was pouring down the roof below her window (there was not a lot else to see with the low-hanging clouds.) _Happier thoughts._ By noon tomorrow the castle will be free of Westergårds, perhaps forever- if they do show up again, from the sounds of it, it’s probably going be ‘what thirteenth brother? Seriously, did we have one?’ (And that was a happy thought, though a rather pitiful one: what must it be like to be ashamed of your brother, or your father’s brother, to neither be able to defend them nor want to?) It might stop raining. Or it might not, and she could ask Kristoff to come and help tidy the attic with her- an obscure attic where there was no room for anyone to come in just in case they wanted any help, just when they were getting on very well indeed just the two of them. (Anna took to heart all the times she’d been told over the last year that marriage was a serious step that wasn’t to be rushed into. That was why she was making sure she got plenty of practice at it.) That’s a plenty happy enough thought to lie down with, listening to the rumble of raindrops surging right over the roof-tiles. 

Before that they’re going to go to church together, apparently. Well, at least when they’re listening to the Bishop, Anna won’t have to try to find things to say to Margareta.

Though ‘we’ had better be including Kristoff. They _are_ engaged, and he’s been at her side for a couple of parties, but it had seemed a little convenient that the first time a foreign king arrived with his daughter had been when Kristoff wasn’t around… Anna rolls over in her bed, wondering how the dispute might go (she never argues with Elsa exactly, oh no, but if Elsa is trying to hide Kristoff away…)

“Of course I’m not,” Elsa says, as she brushes her hair the next morning, only just visible in the mirror behind the great ivory cloud pushed over her face- she always has to separate it to brush layer by layer. Dressed in what might be grey but looks lilac in the dim light, she looks so pale and ethereal that if it weren’t for her voice she might just be a trick of the light, a reflection bounced between the fjord and the mirror to make that slender figure appear to move. “It’s not exactly a sensible long-term policy; Kristoff is here to stay, and if I made him invisible it would start to become…”

“Disloyal? Cowardly?”

“I was going to say ‘conspicuous’.”

“An invisible Kristoff would be conspicuous?”

There’s a suspicion of Elsa’s off-centre smirk under that silky curtain.

“Wouldn’t he just?” She shakes another section of her hair out. “I _was_ trying to draw attention away from some of the sleeping arrangements in these apartments these days.”

“What? Me and Kristoff have separate rooms!”

“You _have_ separate rooms, yes. Quite a long way down a cold corridor.”

“And we go to bed in them. And wake up in them.”

“Well that’s alright then. I don’t have to learn anything that’s going to shock me and my innocence will remain intact.”

“…um. Yes. Yes, that’s good. It’s all good.” _Okay_ … well if Elsa thinks she’s not ready to hear anymore then yeah, Anna can go along with that. Not like there’s anything she would _hid_ efrom Elsa exactly but she doesn’t want to offend Elsa if there’s stuff she doesn’t want hear about. She can find something else to say. There’s loads of other things to say. Like the view out of the dressing room window of, of…

“I see the _Gertrude_ ’s preparing to leave already.”

“Well, they have to make a living.”

“They’ve kept the black sails.”

“I suppose they’re not going to waste a set of sails. Anyway, they won’t stay particularly black forever. And all ships love a story attached to them.”

“I guess… are we wearing black to church, Elsa?”

“No, no. We’re not in mourning. Something sombre. Your grey silk will be fine.”

“Um, it won’t. It’s, um, being re-dyed brown.”

“Brown? Brown silk, you?”

“Yes, I know, but it got covered in coffee!”

“Oh _Anna_!”

“Hey, that wasn’t my fault! There was an _earthquake_!”

“Oh, _that_ day.” Which was weird. Arendelle didn’t have earthquakes, so when Anna had got that strange swaying feeling and the table had started violently rattling Elsa’s tea-set, she’d thought that she was having some kind of fit, and she wondered how she was doing that to the whole table. Then when she looked scared at Elsa and saw her sister staring in amazement at the pastries dancing on the cake-stand, she realised it wasn’t just her. Elsa tried to put down the milk jug but missed, sending a white spray over the tablecloth and as for the coffee that Anna was holding… “I found out about that, you know. Do you remember that there was a strange boom and a big cloud on the horizon? The _Gertrude_ reported that a volcano blew up in Selki’s Island. Not a big one, but big enough.”

“It can’t have been very big if we only know now.”

“Well, you know what it’s like with Selki’s Island; all the news we get here is about a month old.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess so.” Anna fiddles with the belt of her morning-dress. “Do you think Hans was still there for that?”

“I really couldn’t say.” Elsa lifts the side of her hair up as she starts braiding, revealing that she’s looking up at Anna, her eyes wide and bright. “It’s nearly over, darling.”

It goes on for a while longer, though.

It’s not a funeral, as such; the coffin isn’t in the chapel with them; really it’s more a service about the matter that King Magnus is here at all- though it’s not clear whether he’s listening to the Bishop admonishing them all to _send not to ask whom the bell tolls_ , as he keeps fussing over his daughter, patting her hands and asking in whispers whether she’s warm and well enough. Margareta is pale but upright and doesn’t actually look like she requires this much nursemaiding, in fact had she been alone her performance would be marked by its serene dignity and sociable, considerate restraint; rather undermined by being implied at every turn to be overwhelmed by it. How queer that she’s not just almost twenty but clearly quite capable, and yet cannot refuse all this protection and help that seems to make her helpless!

The church isn’t quite empty, there are the few who are always there of course, and a handful of what Anna thinks are guards- she was looking at the floor as she came in because it was so hard to meet anyone’s eyes and not show anything in her face that she didn’t _mean_ to and people would take it wrong.

She’s not hurting anymore, honestly. It’s not personal that the idea of a face she’d both cherished and loathed now being eaten out of existence makes her feel…

 _“And you as well must die, belovèd dust,_ _  
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;  
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,  
This body of flame and steel,_ …” it’s a good reading, though she has heard it before. That would do. _Yes._

“ _Hey,_ ” Kristoff whispers in her ear, “hush now.” His blessedly warm hand encloses hers. So much for secret thoughts.

Well, other secret thoughts then.

She looked down at her hand wrapped in Kristoff’s lying in her skirt- which it turned out was ready and looked better than she’d hoped, and once it was on, with her hair up and the neck high as it was, didn’t suit her badly at all! The only off-putting thing was the way her skirt looked a little like a puddle of melted milk chocolate. Or chocolate fondue. Slightly distracting.

Wow, but Kristoff’s hands were big.

Big feet too. She’s never really looked at boots like them.

She wonders if, if she mislaid Kristoff somehow, she could use his boots to find him again.

Not that she thinks it likely to forget what Kristoff actually looks like. That was a very weird story, now that she thought about it.

It’s not like foot size matters that much.

She mentioned the conversation to Elsa once, over hot chocolate in front of the fire.

“Would foot size matter to you, Elsa?”

“In what context?”

“In the context of whether you wanted to marry someone or not.” Elsa looked puzzled- perhaps at the idea of her marrying _anyone_ , Anna wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was the wrong question to be asking… “I mean when do you get that into the conversation, anyway?”

“I’ve no idea. I suppose given how Hans dressed, you could just look at his genitalia and make a guess.”

Anna had spent a few minutes drinking her chocolate and asking herself what she’d really heard, then another few minutes trying to un-hear it. It was really _weird_ when Elsa made jokes.

For goodness sake! Go back to Kristoff’s hands.

So perfect for enfolding her hand completely. For holding her.

She wonders how big his wedding ring is going to be. Whether it’ll feel different then when he squeezes her hand, among other things.

Are they burning incense in here? They never normally did that in the castle chapel… perhaps the flowers were standing in dirty water.

Think of Kristoff’s hand spread wide over her shoulder, suddenly involuntarily clutching her tight…

He was holding her hand quite tight now, actually. So much strength it felt like he could protect from anything, always controlled, delicate. Like those big hands were just made to hold a little baby…

A little baby that needed changing. What the heck was that _smell_?

“ _There will be an end of chiefs, and there will be an end of chief’s sons, and there will be an end of chief’s wives- and then-“_

And then the Bishop stops because one of the doors at the end of the chapel has crashed open. Not a squeak and a clunk of an ordinary entrance, nothing that could be silenced with a look of enquiry or disapproval, no collective susurrus at some people’s scatterbrainedness or timekeeping would do here.

It is in fact, very ill-timed. Could not have been more inappropriate a person to turn up, to ruin this moment.

Anna screams, and it’s a while before she feels ridiculous.

It’s a _good_ scream, Kristoff will assure her later. Not sissy squealing. Right from the gut. Powerful. Would give a team of wolves second thoughts.

She still instantly isn’t sure _why_ she screamed. But it doesn’t seem inappropriate.

The guards and servants are suddenly all on their feet, straining for a view as if for the entrance of a bride.

Indeed there is one between them- for there are, in a sense, two- who could be said to be wearing white. Except it’s only by inference white, under all the blood.

The head is bigger than Hans’ own head. It’s bigger than his chest. It’s so big his hands don’t actually meet when he’s got it hugged round the neck, with its almost-closed eyes and lolling mouth giving it a crazy look of being astonished to be hugged so (as well it might have.)

Oh, and from the full length of the church it’s obvious that it has been dead for quite a while. And that Hans has been covered in blood- _covered,_ rivulets having run down his face like someone tipped a bucket over his head- for some time, too. It’s so bad that people are taking a step towards him and then falling back again.

And then the Bishop says:

_“…and there will be an end to chief’s sons, and…”_

A guard- (Corporal Haugen?) steps out from the isle, and Hans somehow manages to push past him- and Anna hears what must be his voice, though it’s like no voice she ever heard-

“… _Elsa…Queen Elsa…”_

And Corporal Haugen looks up to the royal pew.

Elsa stands up to her fullest, straightest, where-do-those-extra-inches-come-from height, and comes down the steps to the central aisle. Anna isn’t sure whether or not anyone else can see the round bubbling ball of magic that she’s got cradled ready in her hand.

She can see Hans’ face now, fixed on Elsa’s… in so much as it can be fixed. It’s Hans, just about, but not Hans at the same time- a great violet stain covers one temple down to eyes that don’t match up and under that noisome veil something is out of shape, imperceptibly _wrong_ , an expression that is incoherent.

As he comes close to Elsa- who has gone marble-blank, immovable as a monument of a millennium or more- _Elsa ad infinitum_ \- Anna sees him try to speak again- or at least his lips move.

Elsa merely nods.

“It is done.”

When Hans falls, it still isn’t neat. Holding the bear’s head doesn’t help, as he falls on it and then rolls off, and his head ends up smacking Elsa on the foot. Anna briefly wonders if being headbutted in the foot is painful (if she hadn’t seen it it would sound very questionable.) Elsa’s face only looks furious for a split second before, oh _yes_ Elsa, she throws the magic she’s been holding into the very dead head of the bear beside her, freezing it solid. Then she does cave in and say:

“ _Help_.”

Anna and Kristoff need no more encouragement, and Haugen (if that’s who it is) is soon there, and even Margareta- though she bends over Hans, although Anna can more or less forgive that.

“Is he dead, Elsa?”

“I don’t think so.”

It’s not too bad until Haugen tentatively rolls the bear’s head aside to lift the whole body lying in the aisle and…

“Good gods,” he breathes, then looks up embarrassed, muttering, “sorry.”

“ _Ooh,_ no kidding.”

“That is a _very_ broken arm.”

Elsa looks over Anna’s shoulder at what they’ve seen- there just shouldn’t _be_ so many ways in which that left arm should be twisted.

“You know- Dr. von Rodham would have to see it, but I think it’s rather worse than that.”

“Wait, what?”

“I’ll explain later. Corporal, please take this man to hospital and have your men do… something with his… tribute. Preferably elsewhere.”

Fortunately for Corporal Haugen, he has men subordinate to him to call on.

Now that the head is frozen above everything else, it takes four men to lift it up in a chorister’s cassock- which actually causes Hans’ eyes to flicker open for a moment. By now Kristoff and Haugen are sliding the parts of a guardhouse stretcher under him, trying tactfully to make Margareta get out of their way. It must be her pale face, more so for the black bonnet, that he sees, when he blinks in seemingly sluggish thought and manages to mutter:

“Who’s dead?”

Kristoff looks at him with a smile.

“Guess.”


	4. The Everyday Impossible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which events that can't have happened are nonetheless dealt with

The captain of the Nokkuò Liina seems more preoccupied with gazing at the tapestry behind Elsa than looking at who he was speaking to- as it happens to be not one but two monarchs, Elsa thinks she understands why.

"We found him on the estuary on our way out, just sort of standing there. It's rare enough to see a man alone out there, so I took a look through the spyglass and there he was."

"And did you realise _who_ he was at once?"

"Well, yeah. Word had got about as to his being sentenced to fight the Jadskar Bear; so when we saw him there with the biggest bear's head any of us had ever seen, we all thought: that'll be him then."

"And he was, what... hitch hiking?"

"Uh, no, uh, sire... When you espy a man just standing at the sea edge out in the wilds like that, he doesn't have to signal. It's pretty much assumed that he wants to get somewhere else. Most people do."

"So you stop for them all?"

"You hail them. It's what you do. Look, your Queen, in Selkis if you see a man out in the wilds, you hail him. It's not like in port. If you see a man there's always time to talk to him, even if you just check each other are well and still mostly sane. It can be something that only happens a couple of times a week. If you see the only other man within a three-day walk, you don't want him to be shy."

 _Perhaps I should have left this to Kristoff_ Elsa thinks. _He may be determined that he will lub on land for as long as possible but he’s not unlike this. He'd know what was a silly question._

“So you hailed Prince Hans and he asked for passage back to Arendelle.”

“Not exactly. He wasn’t in condition to ask much- _Arendelle_ and Queen Elsa we could just about catch, and the rest one could guess.”

“So he was speaking, but not very well? And walking?”

“Enough to get aboard. I wouldn’t let him go below with the bear’s head though, so for the first couple of days he sat in the lee of the for’csle and… well, that’s about it. He seemed to go sort of blank. In the end Herr Ohls got him to drink a bit of soup and managed to coax him into a hammock. As long we left him, he would just sit there staring at nothing. Sometimes Herr Ohls or me would tell him to have a walk about to the prow and back or bring him a cup and say ‘drink this’, and he would do it.”

“What- Hans just did as he was told without disputing it?”

“Yes sire.”

“I’d wonder if you had the right man if I hadn’t seen him myself. He must be ill.”

It wasn’t really much of a joke. There was no question that Hans really was too ill to be belligerent. It had taken most of the afternoon- after the guards had left him on a couch in the salon, where nobody wanted him to be, and messages went back and forth Elsa found herself glaring at Hans, lying there still slack-faced and filthy, trying for the sake of dignity to hold in the unchecked thought- how dare he be still in my house, still on my mind, lying there shiftless and filthy?

“Well, he was in pretty poor condition. He’d managed to lose any kit he had on him, and by then the trouble down one side of his face was starting to show.”

“You seem to have taken excellent care of the Prince.”

“Not at all. Men coming off the island, some of them have sometimes become a little strange out there, even to themselves. It didn’t seem that out of the ordinary, even as he seemed to get worse. Seen that before- men who were picked up as competent outdoorsmen, brought to safety and something like comfort they then go completely to pieces, like children.”

“What- they forget how to walk and talk?”

“Forget how to talk, yes. Or talk funny. I grant you Prince Hans is a bit extreme.”

Though it was more what he _had_ done- what twenty, perhaps thirty, sane and unbiased witnesses had seen him do that morning- that defied belief, or at least defied belief of Dr von Rodham, the brain and nerve specialist, a handsome and completely intractable Berliner who was determined to teach Arendelle modern scientific theory regardless of things that actually happened in Arendelle.

“That at least doesn’t surprise me. I suppose after their struggles there they are exhausted.”

“Tired from the trek, tired from having to talk to other men when they’re used to being alone, unused to being conscious of themselves, any of those things. And the huldra, of course.”

“The huldra? Sorry, what’s that?”

“A sort of faerie woman; they supposedly lurk in the high mountains and lure unmarried men who go astray.” Elsa could picture the illustrated compendium of folklore on her lap. “They’re said to be extremely beautiful but for having a cow’s tail, and they’ve nothing on their minds but getting a man to marry them. Then supposedly they turn into ugly old women, but are good wives to their husbands.”

“Does a well-brought up lady know about huldras? You see them in the high mountains a lot at this time of year.”

“A little. The books that I was reading usually were written with the assumption they weren’t real, of course.”

“You mean, like ice-sorcery isn’t real, your majesty?”

“Quite so.” Elsa shrugged it off, unabashed. “So there really are faerie mountain temptresses in the islands to the north?”

“Well I don’t know myself about temptresses. None of my crew would go off alone. One hears stories, but then one doesn’t get their side of it. Supposedly they have nothing better to do than lure men, but a girl with no friends doesn’t have to be a faerie for men to blame everything on her.’ He glanced up at the queen, perhaps surprised himself at a trace of high feeling in his voice. Elsa nodded attentively. “Mind you what the islanders say about them is different.’

“Do go on.”

“On the mainland they may want husbands. In the islands they’re preoccupied with getting men to give them babbies. Nobody explains why. And then if he sees her cow’s tail and recoils at it, she flies into a rage and eats him alive. And they get tired of their own screaming babies so they sneak in and swap them for human ones.”

“What, they think human babies cry less?” King Magnus smiled with grim satisfaction. “They’re fools to themselves.”

“I don’t like to think, sire. It seems they get the blame if someone’s got a baby that’s never happy whatever they do.”

“Hans should have fitted in well with them. If he hadn’t had a well-attended nursery it would have been a good explanation for him. Never known a child so discontented.”  
“…sir?”

“Sorry, Captain. Irrelevant mental meandering. Do go on. About Prince Hans aboard your ship- how did he seem to you?”

“He wasn’t much use, but he wasn’t any trouble either. He had a long rest, and when we docked he seemed to rally enough to get ashore with his bear’s head, and walked off very purposefully- not quite steady but definitely going. I think my mate tried to waylay him and he just walked off. And then we waited for you to summon me, your majesty.”

“And you came very promptly, thank you.”

The captain gave a stiff and embarrassed bow on his way out.

“Well. That was… informative. Mind you that’s sailors for you. You never really know what to make of their stories.”

“Possibly not. Though I’m not sure _I’m_ in any position to be sceptical.”

“Perhaps not. Do you think my brother has been bewitched?”

“Do you? You know him better than I do.”

“Well, I’m not sure if Hans would be much moved by a faerie temptress.”

“No?”

“Not without her making some kind of other promise to him. I mean I’ve never been certain, but…”

“What?”

“…oh… oh nothing. Just that to the best of my knowledge, what Hans finds attractive in a woman is expediency. Still, we found out a good deal anyway.”

“So Hans has been more or less functional for a couple of weeks, walked from the quay with that great heavy head, and now…”

“From what the doctor said… well, nothing, really, according to Greta. He breathes, they think he can well swallow enough to survive. They’re not promising any more than that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you? I don’t know why. You would have had every right to hang him.”

“I tried to be clever instead. No statute ever passed gives the state a right to do that. Mutilations, in the past, yes- a brand, an extremity cut off, yes, but not this.”

“Well, Elsalein, consider this: all that valiant violation was all very well in the past. But what’s the point of modern criminal justice? To remove the criminal from society and hopefully to turn him into a law-abiding citizen. Which, you must agree, Hans is going to be from now on.”

“They’re also usually expected to become useful members of society.”

“I don’t think any of my brothers could be hit on the head hard enough to change them into useful members of society. They’re all essentially ornamental. And if Hans lives for forty years lying in his bed with a nurse in attendance, then he’ll be less trouble than he’s ever been in his life. Probably more pleasant to have around than he’s ever been in his life. I couldn’t have asked you to effect a better change on the boy. He’s certainly ceased to be any threat to you. Now, where has my daughter gone to occupy herself?”

“Anna was seeing if she could fit her into a dress. Probably one of mine. She’d only packed mourning clothes and that won’t do now.”

By the time Anna shows in Margaretta in her borrowed clothes the fog has lowered to a premature night- despite the fact that summer will still yield a few more sunlit evenings- it's nights like this, far more than the snow, that it feels like madness to have land in the north.

When Kai brings the candelabra so that they may actually see Margaretta (to reveal just how awkward she looks being on show in such informal clothes) there is much general rejoicing, though nobody thanks him directly for giving them something to say to each other- about the advantages or otherwise of the new rock oil over whale oil and whether Ynysland had enough whales left for it to matter if there was a competition between the two; then they talk of gas jets and how Queen Lene had had gas lighting installed in the winter palace three years ago ("So we all spent winter fully able to see each other at all hours by this bright white light- which doesn't flatter the complexions of at least half of my family...") until Magnus had realised in the spring what it had done to the paintings and tapestries and ordered the palace to be plunged into complimentary candlelight again.

"I think Father was probably right. It seemed unhealthy. Everyone suddenly became disposed to headaches and fainting," Margareta says diplomatically. She is wearing an assortment the garments borrowed from Elsa and the late Queen Idunn, neither of whom match her in height ("it's okay," Anna assured her, "most women here wear their skirts a little short!", not bothering to say that those weren't actually dirndl bunad skirts and it was all wrong because who cared?), and both of whom favoured deep blue and violet, which gives Margareta shadows under her eyes that even the glow of beeswax does little to improve.

"Speaking of which, Anna, how did you get on with the osteologist this afternoon?"

"The who now?"

"The bone doctor. What did he tell you?"

"Oh dear, having bone trouble, Princess?"

_"Father..."_

"Not _my_ bones, no. Not anyone's bones in particular. Though I guess they're a bit of a problem, though I don't know if I would say my problem... Well, the doctor who reviewed the bones in the coffin yesterday, he was looking at them to work out who they belonged to. And I was watching him."

"I don't suppose it's worth advertising in the newspapers?"

"What- for a man whose bones have gone missing?"

"I was thinking more of someone whose relative or workmate is missing, but I suppose one hears of medical miracles all the time."

"Um, no. Well, what he said was..."

* * *

  
“Oh yes, suspicious from the start,” Dr. Scheer holds up an arm bone: a humerus, he called it ( _he must have a strange sense of humer_ , Anna thinks) as if he’s sighting down it. “Could that be by any stretch of the imagination Prince Hans’ arm? Look at the length! I would suppose our mystery man is barely as tall as your highness, and not a great deal heavier.”

“A mystery man, though? Not a mystery lady? Or a mystery little boy?”

“Oh no. Men’s bones are quite different. You have to look at the ends of the bones: he’s probably not very old, not much wear, but he’s certainly a grown man, he stopped growing some years before he died. Early twenties, at a guess. And look here at his skull. The eye sockets, the ramus of the mandible bone here… definitely a man.” Dr. Scheer turned the skull round and gazed into the empty eye-sockets. “Funny him having a mandible like that, really. Would have meant he had a distinctive long chin. Not unlike Prince Hans. But certainly not him.”

“A little man. Not like Hans.”

“Maybe what Prince Hans might have been if he were poorly fed. These teeth are quite worn for such a young man, but not rotten: his bread was coarse, but he rarely ate sugar; and he has teeth absolutely straight to each other without an overbite, which is unusual- not something shared with the prince. And yet he was well-made enough, maybe even a powerful man for his size; the muscle markings are distinct.”

“Not a prince, then?”

“That, bones can’t tell us.”

“Well, ah, my sister, ah, the Queen, she wants to know if there’s any chance of finding out who he is?”

“Like this? Only to write to Jadskar to find out if any man has been missed, but then, on Selki’s Island...”

“I know. Could be a lot of people.”

“And over a long time, too. However, some of my students could try to work out a drawing of him. It might be quite an interesting study for them, if the Queen permits me to keep them.”

“Oh, I’m sure she does!”

* * *

 

  
Elsa tapped on the door, then wondered why she had when she let herself in anyway. The room was unlit but for the fire in the grate- the window was still uncovered but the sky was a slate colour that made it impossible to tell whether the sun was behind it or not.

A spectre appeared from the shadows, draped in long gown and wimple in shades of grey and white, unfolded from being seated by the bed, to stand, a head taller than Elsa, hands folded, head bowed, waiting.

_“They come from a new-made school, overseas,” Dr von Rodham had said. “It’s a regimented life- but they are the future."_

“Nurse Luci,” Elsa said, “have you no candles?”

The nurse made what might have been a curtsy, between the dark and the great looseness hiding her body it was hard to tell.

“Candles I wait for. It is better for patient with less light.”

Elsa’s eyes were drawn, though she had not wanted to see him, to Nurse Luci’s patient, laid in a posture that made him look crumpled, as if he had fallen there, and indefinably smaller- perhaps with the weight he’d lost, or maybe just the posture. He’d clearly been cleaned up, the filth of his mysterious battle washed away as if it had never been, and even shaved. A sheen of sweat had risen unhampered on his face, reflecting the dancing flames, the only movement to be seen on him.

“Do you know what to do for him, nurse?”

“Yes. Very well.”

Von Rodham had, in fact, been full of recommendations- she had nursed the count’s son who had been at the Yule ball this year after a fall in spring when all said he would die, the mine-owners’ little boy who had had some complication of measles…

 _“…and she will speak the language well enough,”_ he added- not saying ‘she is a foreigner, like me, she won’t mind the history of this case.'

“I will be sent from this house now, your majesty?”

“Tomorrow. Not to his country- to another place where there will not be trouble, understand?” And away from me, until he dies or von Rodham lets him go for good. Let me close this matter, for me, for Anna.

The nurse looked towards the sea, and the last of the light showed her in profile- pale, with dark eyes, not quite young but not so very old- the look of a woman pushed by tides of life whose plans included still sleeping indoors at the end of the week. A good, gentle spectre, a ghost of comfort and cleanliness, as indiscriminate as the rain that falls on the wicked and on the good.

* * *

 

  
“Look, anchors away! They’re definitely moving… they’re off!” Olaf waved, and Anna had to juggle him to stop him being dropped over the balcony rail- he ended up jumbled, with his head disappearing under Anna’s arm.

“Whoops! Sorry- Elsa, can you give me a hand?”

“Well, put him down and I’ll pass you both hands.”

“Right- there! Can you look through the rails? No, that way. There they go. Well, that was… well, they were… they’ll be happy to get home. All that family to miss.”

“Yes. If only they’d taken all their relatives with them.”

The barge that had cut through the smooth fjord waters before them hours ago was already lost in the mist- when she had seen it go, it had seemed to Elsa for a moment that she saw it flanked by three queens in black hoods, until the image turned into the much more comforting one of two boatmen, a guard and a hired nurse huddled in her cloak- an Englishwoman with excellent references and no obvious home, who might as well spend several months in a fur-trading town on an island at the fjord mouth as anywhere else. Presumably they had arrived at the house made ready for them, probably having tucked the patient into bed and left the new de facto mistress of the house to settle herself in.

“You arranged for him to stay.”

“The doctor was positive that making the journey back to the Southern Isles would kill him. I don’t want anyone saying that Hans wasn’t given a fair chance.”

“Is that the same doctor who was positive that Hans couldn’t walk or talk?”

“I know… but he is the best we have to go on.”

“Elsa… if it is brain fever, isn’t that the one where they have to shave your hair off?”

“I doubt it. Nobody gets brain fever outside of romantic novels.”

“Shame. I mean, if you had to really come up with a sentence for Hans…”

“I’d draw the line at torture.”

“Yeah. I wonder if he would have done.”

“I don’t care. I’m not him. That’s rather the point I’ve been trying to make.”

Olaf squeezed his head back from between the rails.

“Well I think you’re the best queen a _nīðing_ could have come to,” he said.

Elsa peered down at him through his flurry.

“What does that word mean, Olaf?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

Olaf furrowed his improbable eyebrows.

“Well if you don’t know, why did I say it?”

“I’ve really no idea. There’s so much about how your mind works that I don’t know.”

“Elsa, you’re not going to send him to Dr. von Rodham, are you?”

“Absolutely not.”


	5. The transparent queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As winter sets in, something weird starts happening in the castle. Unusually weird, that is.

It’s almost impossible to say when it started.

Winter begins setting in in Arendelle, and while the castle is the product of centuries of shoring up against the cold, no slightly shrunken window frame or lifting tile can be noticed at once. Even in Anna’s childhood there was nothing strange about a whole wing of the castle suddenly falling into an outdoor chill.

And if Olaf now wanders into the parlour and says:

“Oh. Elsa not in here?” Anna doesn’t think anything strange about it-

“Yeah, she’s not- I mean, no, you’re right- I mean, she isn’t here.”

“Now that’s funny. For some reason I was sure Elsa wanted me in here.”

“She told you that?”

“No. Just thought she was in here waiting.”

“…oh. Well you know, sometimes you get a trick of the light- I thought I saw her go past yesterday, turned out to be a sunbeam that just appeared on the wall. I think she’s in the study if you want her?”

“Oh. My mistake. Hey Elsa, I’ll be right up…”

“I don’t think she can hear you, Olaf- oh, you’ve gone.”

Anna shivers and fastens the buttons on her jacket. She wasn’t imagining it- there’s definitely frost forming on the inside of the window.

 _Maybe I’ll go see if she’s okay_ , Anna thinks.

And when she goes up to find Elsa smirking with triumph over a particularly flattering and polite letter she’s just drafted to the Duke of Wesselton about how she refuses to extradite three smugglers to his domain, Anna forgets all about it, seeing as there really wasn’t anything out of the ordinary to remember.

* * *

 

  
_To HRH Princess Beatrice Maria Antonia ‘Rapunzel’ Fitzherbert von Corona_

_Dear Cousin,_

_So sorry to hear about your current situation- what a terrible bore. Not the baby- or babies by the sound of it, of course, but having to start lying in so early. I suppose it had better be twins, with all this trouble. I’ve more than half a mind to get on a boat right away, never mind sitting here writing letters, and come to your couch and try to entertain you, but according to Elsa storm season is coming and she thinks I would be underfoot with you trying to get ready for your babies (I think that’s a very Elsa way to look at it but Kristoff isn’t cooperating with me either.)_

_Anyway life continues much as usual here- how pleasant this particular normality is!-we got through the state banquet with the lords and ladies of Arendelle on Mabonnacht without any particular mishaps except one probably random bowl of soup (that of the Markis von Hippel, for the record) getting frozen (well, Elsa insists it was completely random and doesn’t even know how it happened- Markis von Hippel seems to have believed her, though I think there was a risk of gossip breaking out about why he was so un-favoured all of a sudden). Anyway apart from that it all ran pretty well, Elsa had settled on a speech that actually got some laughs (I mean it’s not that Elsa isn’t usually funny it’s that what’s funny to Elsa usually needs about five minutes explaining to most people why it’s funny); and she dropped in some references to Kristoff’s presence continuing to be assumed that it suddenly occurred to me that it’s not something that needs to be announced or explained any more, come July he’s going to be my husband and that’s that. Not that I was too startled, but then a lot of wine and mead had gone round at that point and what with all the candles the whole hall felt sort of warm and honeyed, the way I look forward to in winter._

_The next night we went to see the trolls-all three of us for once; they still make Elsa a little nervous, though I think it’s partly because she’s used to only seeing the trolls if there’s a serious reason and she was a little embarrassed at first to see them goofing around- though not as embarrassed as I was when they started asking me about a dozen questions about Kristoff and such things, and then Olaf pointed out that I hesitated before I gave them the non-answers, because sometimes they give us love expertise that we haven’t asked for. Anyway then the little ones came in with a bouquet for me (they grow hothouse flowers there that most of us couldn’t dream of)- which caused Elsa to give me an ‘I’m not asking’ look that I thought was a bit excessive- but when the bouquet kept going on and on and built up into a flower castle, in six sections for all the seasons together- there was no sense in being ironic and suspicious, and when Bulda, Kristoff’s adoptive mother, had me kneel before her and hung a pendent round my neck that glowed from within: “not for protection- because a light won’t do that- but remember when you’ve many to watch over, I’m still here to watch over you.” At first I thought she was talking about my children- I guess she is- then I noticed Kristoff checking Elsa was alright as she’d got tired and was looking nervous again, and I thought no, when you join with another person you’re making a stronger structure that all manner of those who have only their own strength are sheltered under- like a balancing trick, it’s not safe to hold up a person on your own, but when two people make a stronger structure together the person standing on them is safe. (I think that metaphor got turned upside down somewhere.)_

_Speaking of which Elsa’s been odd at the moment- I think erratic might be the word I want. Of course she over-works herself as she always does, though she does stop for meals and sometimes comes riding, and we manage a bit of a walkabout on Saturday and she takes Olaf to the park on Tuesday afternoons, so she’s not in one of her really bad funks where she resents having to be human instead of a sort of paperwork machine (if only there were some sort of machine where a few levers would fill in all these papers but for a few details! I’m sure there will be one soon and think of all the time it would save, so nobody would have to spend all their time at a desk!) But of course there’s always these tensions of decisions that have to be taken and I know she’s more worried than she lets on because I see frost and snow flurries starting all over the place, even when she’s a long way away, and I’ll go to see her and she looks as if she’s fine, but obviously she isn’t. (How difficult it would be to look after Elsa without her powers. She could be in torment and I might never know. As it is she does all she can to hide when she’s stressed, but she can’t just pretend it away, much as she tries.) Kristoff believes me, but being Kristoff says I’ll just have to wait until she comes to me to be looked after- which she won’t, in fact she often outright denies that there can be ice where I say there is. Until it leads to an argument and when I’m right, then she throws a huff and freezes ornaments for the sake of it (at least until she exploded a crystal decanter. We had to not use the room for the rest of the evening until it was defrosted so that Ingrid the housemaid could tell what was glass and what was ice. Not that we used it but it doesn’t do for a queen to explode a gift.)_

_That makes it sound like there’s trouble in the castle and there really isn’t, most of the time we’re quite jolly. We’ve been getting ready for the Winternights ball- last one of the ‘season’- at least that’s what Elsa is laying down as the society rules that I think she’s making up as she goes along- probably because it may be a royal ball but a good deal of the Winternights spirit outside still makes its way inside- definitely the noisiest ball of the year and the one that takes the longest to finish after it’s over- last year I don’t believe any lady got away without her colourful gown having at least a bit of a tear. I shall make a resolution this year not to dance with food, or even near the supper table, but I can’t make any promises (who would have thought I would actually even be able to fall in a punch bowl, gown and all?)_

_I will write and tell you how I get on with that._

_Much love,_

_Anna_

* * *

 

  
It has already been dark for several hours when Elsa got ready for bed- giving a half-thrilling, half-frightening impression that it was long past midnight ever since six in the evening, especially as a dull, snow-threatening day blotted out the sunset anyway. Only the fact that Anna peep round the door and said she was going to bed made Elsa believe that it was as late as she thought it was.

“Ahem. Your majesty?” Elsa looks up from her desk into long-familiar grey eyes, a little more shadowed than usual. 

“Gerda? I thought you would have turned in by now, I was going myself.”

“That’s what I came to say, Ma’am. The bath that was poured for you is still waiting.”

“Oh, Valkyries’ knickers! I’m so sorry, I had no idea what time it was- I’ll see to it myself, do go to bed, Gerda…”

Elsa is aware, in a theoretical way, that other women of status do not send their maids to bed before themselves, hang up their gown, unlace their own stays and take down their own hair- some habits of thirteen years of solitude persist, like the absurdity of the idea of being put to bed like an infant… though laid back in the tub, drowsy in lavender-scented steam, listening to raindrops on the roof, with all silent but the shifting of logs on the fire and the occasional bubbling of the next kettle, she could, in fact, fancy being an infant- picked up in the embrace of a fluffy towel, Mama carrying her to her own bed, almost falling asleep before she was even laid down…

It doesn’t unnerve her when some sense- no sense wondering which- perceives the faintest presence of magic around her- why would it?

“Olaf?” she says, “is that you?”

There’s no answer, and somehow it’s not quite like the magic that Olaf lives by, and it’s just occurring to her to wonder-

When suddenly a sheet of ice flashes into existence over the water, it’s the jolt of it that shocks her. It doesn’t feel unpleasant- actually it’s rather invigorating, cold over hot, but when she had been half asleep the shock offends and angers her.

She’s done it before, dozens of times- to show off to Anna and exasperate Gerda when they must have been tiny, the star of ice ringing her little barrel-shaped body posed in a star herself- when she was older, feeling punished by the over-hot water, defiantly letting spidery frost pattern her skin and iceburgs drift round her visible ribs and ashen breasts that she was watching grow with a drear sense of fatality, and filling her hair with crystals.

But she always felt it, or felt something- even when the ice had come out of her without her control, she’d felt _something_ , even if she had sometimes mistaken it for a flash of emotion until there was snow everywhere. Even the winter in summer… she’d felt _something_ , though she’d not seen what it was doing at the time.

To have flash-frozen her bath while almost asleep (and Elsa had never in her life frozen her bed as she slept), such a sudden burst of magic when she had been relaxed… it feels  like an insult. But from what?

And then the fire hisses into darkness, and both candles go out.

For a moment Elsa sits, ice-bound, in the dark, contemplating what exactly her options are (she’s  put candles out spontaneously before, of course, but only ever when shut up in the safety of her bedroom, when she was very much aware of it, and would give up and make a cave for herself in the bed and try not to think of anything until Mama came in the morning.) There is not a sound but the crackle of ice on warm water, and the rattle of raindrops outside.

“Alright,” she says at last. “Alright. So that’s the way of it.”

What a year of freely playing with her powers has taught her was that her ice, freshly made, has a violet iridescence, that gives shape to the darkness just well enough for her to finish washing- just to assert that she really isn’t unnerved- and, having broken the sheet over her bath, to cast a blue, glowing trail on which she can walk- naked but for her towel, but apparently there’s nobody to see- to her bed.

She wakes to the sound of knocking and Anna’s voice saying: “Elsa? It’s me. They said you hadn’t got up. Can I come in?”

The tone is bright and friendly- it is Anna after all- but the pattern carries something else- unlike when Anna would knock when they were younger- or indeed when she’d come to Elsa in the course of a working day- there’s no trace of nervousness or apology- on the contrary, there’s an edge to Anna’s voice, a firm certainty (‘ _you will, of course, be going along with this because you know I know best_ ’)- one that Elsa uses every day, of course, but Anna? Anna only occasionally lets that show through, the glimpse of a wise and capable woman behind the vacillating, goofy girl that most people see- and is nearly always all that is there.

That gentle firmness, on the other hand, she does use on Elsa, sometimes- those increasingly few occasions when Elsa is distressed to the point of disease and needs Anna’s care.

Then Elsa feels the sheets against her bare body and her hair loose and tickling her waist and the strangeness of the night, the ice and cold that for once she never felt belonged to her, the feelings of the dark magic-lit room comes back to her. _Is_ there something wrong? What has she done? What part of her, what madness, has taken over that she doesn’t know her own magic? She _knew_ there was something unreal about her walk in the dark by ice-light- so where is reality?

“Elsa, I’m coming in.” Oh yes- she’s been silent waiting for Anna to imagine what she was going to find in here. Not that Anna coming to help her is a bad thing.

She lifts her head to see Anna entering, and her sister’s face relaxing to find the room perfectly un-frosted. 

“Oh. How are you?”

“I… I feel fine. Is something happening? Something weird?”

“Not _excessively_ weird, don’t worry. Why are you sleeping in the nude, did you spill cocoa on your nightie?”

“Anna, please- is _something_ happening? I don’t know what’s going on!”

“Well, you were asleep. A little past normal time. The staff were worried that you were having a bad day. And, well, there’s so much ice about-“

“What? But there’s not- there can’t be- I’d know-“

“Hey, don’t get upset, it’s just some random frost on the carpets, nobody’s hurt. It’s nothing to snow about. Actually we thought it was Olaf fooling around.”

“Olaf?... that’s strange… last night my bath froze up and I’m sure I didn’t do anything- for a moment I thought it was something Olaf had done. What made you think of Olaf?”

“I don’t know. Just something about standing there, seeing the ice go along the carpet, made me think: Olaf. Or rather the snowbabies generally, but usually Olaf, I mean he does live here…”

“Where is it? I’m going to go and see what’s going on, this has got-“

“Elsa! Clothes!”

Elsa looks down at herself and makes a gesture that makes perfect sense to her, and is dressed, or at least covered.

“…okay.” Anna says quietly, as Elsa walks away. “Because of course a nightie needs a cape, how could you sleep without one?”

She finds Elsa in a passageway following a frost trail past the drawing-room door. In front of Elsa is a loose scattering of crystals. Behind her the crystals are merged and fused- each step has turned into Elsa’s familiar, delicate six-pointed fractal snowflake.

“Elsa?”

“It’s not right… this isn’t normal…” 

_Well normal would be far more worrying._

“Elsa, come on. It’s okay. Come here. Really- Elsa? Come here.”

“Not the time for a hug, Anna.”

“I must beg to query that point, your Majesty. It is always the time for a hug.”

“Anna, please listen: I’m not doing this. I’m _not_. I know that I’ve not made this ice- trust me!”

“I guess… though- do you remember the time you like, set off the winter… I mean you didn’t know-“

“Yes, yes Anna. I do remember that. But I did know I’d done _something_ that day- building the tower and all, you see?”

“And now you’re upset again.”

“You don’t believe me. You don’t believe me! I can’t make you understand this!”

“No, Elsa, I don’t understand. Please stop shouting. Please come and hold my hand. Before I get frightened too. Elsa. Please.”

When Elsa offers her hand, she’s distracted and, well, offhand, if you can use that word. Which is good really- if Elsa was getting into a bad place, taking Anna’s hand would have been a big deal that she had to push herself into. Anna squeezes it, just to keep her sister there with her. 

“This is a new thing, Anna. It’s not just not being able to control it. I can’t _feel_ it coming from _me_.”

“I believe you. But that still doesn’t make it okay for you to get frightened. That never helps anyth-“

“What’s that noise?”

There _was_ a noise. 

Not a noise. Music. Of a sort.

“It’s almost under our feet… oh no…”

“No! Absolutely no! I don’t care how it’s happening-“

“Mother’s harp!”

It actually isn’t that quick to get to the music room- the noise could get straight up through the floor but getting to it requires going all the way to the end of the landing, through the ballroom to the spiral staircase- and running into Kristoff going up it- and down again, along the halls, to where the sound is coming from- it isn’t that it wasn’t music, exactly- an odd key and rather repetitive but definitely music- but the harp strings are being pulled too hard and anyway it was _Mother’s harp_ , that neither of them had ever really got a gift for like she had, that came with mother from her home before she was married, that Papa had adored so much, that hasn’t been touched in five years-  
\- that was now coated with ice over its bowed side and several of its strings.

“Get off that! Get off that right away! You’ll damage it! You can’t… you’ve no right…”

“Elsa…”

“This is intolerable, how dare you? Yes, how dare you?”

“Elsa? Who are you talking to?”

“I don’t know! Just look at the place! Someone is doing this. Someone, something. Something _aware_.”

“It knew what a harp was for.”

“It didn’t know how to tune it.”

“I guess Elsa’s right. It reeks of magic in here.”

“Wait, what, you can- oh-“

The harp strings are suddenly relieved of frost, only for another noise to start happening- a nasty metallic clanging, almost but not quite music- so bad it takes a moment to work out where it’s coming from.

“Well,” Elsa says, hugging her arms across her stomach, her eyebrows furrowed. “I might lose track of what I’m freezing but at least I know how a piano works.”

She strides across and bashed at the keys- a bad-tempered one-fingered scale that keeps missing out notes and sounding weird. The sounds become even stranger, more bendy and buzzy, until they stops altogether- a frost blooms out through the wood of the piano, then melts.

“Well… that stopped it, whatever it was.”

“It stopped it trying to play the piano, anyway.”

“Which is good. Do you really think you can smell magic?”

“Of course. How do you think I knew when I met you that it was Elsa up the North Mountain?”

Elsa looks up, dejected.

“Really?”

“Only if you know what it is. It smells sorta like sleighbells.”

“I’m sorry? Sleighbells smell?” 

“Um, Kristoff…”

“Don’t be silly. It smells like the sound of sleighbells. And it sounds blue.”

 “I wish I could be more like you. I could say what I mean and not worry about whether I was conveying any meaning to anyone else.”

“Smells aside, have you two seen that case?”

“Case of what?”

“There.” Anna points at a glass display cabinet that decorates the music room wall. 

The case holds a strange object- an ancient, hardened wooden stave with iron rings hung around it, labelled in a historical hand: “ _Rattle, c. year 800_ ”- and it’s hard to argue with. (As Anna has understood it, their people around the year 800 didn’t leave many instruments, wrote no music down, didn’t write much about making music other than singing and according to the foreigners who met them had been terrible musicians anyway.)

Now the case is fast becoming opaque as the ice creeps over it, thicker and thicker until the thin glass shivered in on itself and rains in frozen splinters to the floor, the rattle among them.

It shakes a few times, what Anna would have thought of as a tarantella rhythm, though that seems to be unlikely to be the intention. Then it drops to the floor and becomes encased in a molehill of ice.

Elsa looks on almost contemptuous.

“ _Not me_.”

“No. I believe you.”

* * *

  
Still, there’s not much to be done. Kristoff talks about going to the trolls, but the long nights are setting in, and the weather is turning to winter; this year there’s no great excitement of a long first snow, just lots of short, unceremonious ones so that the mountains very slowly retreat under their white blankets- no day of watching the world change nor morning of waking up to the transformation- the slow progression from mud to slush to dappling to a fine crust to a thick padding is the slow work of weeks, impossible to see at once, like watching oneself grow.

“I could still go,” Kristoff protests, “You know me and Sven don’t mind the snow. Going out in the snow is what we _do_.”

“Sure. Do you want me to knit you a hair shirt for your trip?”

“Do _you_ want me to throw the business in, huh? Stay home polishing the sled, getting fat?”

“If it’s your figure you’re worried about there must be simpler ways.”

“I like this way.”

They don’t carry on down that line, because the trouble is she knows she’s right, and she doesn’t really want to be: the crown princess marrying a man of no family in particular- not even a common one- is one thing, one thing that might just be acceptable, but marrying a man who continues to be in trade- let alone a heavy, physical trade that involves disappearing into the wilderness for days or weeks on end- it can’t go on forever, and they both know it. But the idea of Kristoff spending the rest of his life in diplomatic service seems as bizarre as putting Sven at the next desk him in a matching suit.

“What are you snickering at?”

“The idea of using Sven in an administrative capacity.”

“What did you have in mind? A desk spike?”

“Now you’re being absurd.”

“I thought one of us was. Thank goodness it’s me.”

“Exactly. You’re very silly. Very silly indeed.” She kisses him. “But I will tolerate it all the same.”

“Thank goodness for that.”

With that, the conversational diversion from what they were doing was forgotten, for it was late, and Elsa was almost certainly asleep, or at least safely in her room, and the servants stood down for the night, and the bright firelight turned Kristoff’s eyes shiny and fathomless dark, and his skin radiant and honeyed, and gave Anna a glowing sauna-flush of boneless, breathless sensitivity. (And they are _going_ to be married, quite soon now. Things are definitely put in motion towards it. And nothing’s going to go wrong in the meantime, nothing that would embarrass Elsa, still less upset her. Actually Anna is almost completely sure she has no real secrets from Elsa- not even the things she doesn’t tell her. It’s only the tiny uncertainty that Elsa doesn’t already know that stops her from saying anything outright.)

It’s only the tiny possibility that there’s anyone in the castle who doesn’t realise that the Princess ever does things with the Royal Icemaster behind closed doors that she wouldn’t do in front of them (well, except possibly in secluded mountain meadows. Or the stable loft. Or, well, places where they’re not looking) that means that Anna ends up running shivering through a cold passageway, ready to dive into her own bed. After so long she doesn’t need lights, it would slow her down and anyway would have required her to stick an arm outside of her shawl, something she’s got no intention of doing- she’s occupied enough by spurring herself on by chanting _cold, cold, cold! cold, cold, cold_!

Outside the windows that she passes there is just enough light reflected from the night-lanterns of the harbour to show that it's snowing again, fat flakes falling almost vertically, faster than one thought of snow coming down. 

Anna always did like the thrill of the first big snowfall, but never more than now when it comes with the thought: _Kristoff's not going anywhere for a while!_

When she gets to her room, for some reason the curtains are half-open, showing the view onto the fjord- and showing the pale, ice-clad figure standing there before the window, silently watching.

"Hey, Elsa! Something wrong?" 

Elsa says nothing, just keeps watching her.

"I know I was up kinda late, I was just saying goodnight to Kristoff, and-"

The look Elsa's giving her isn't indulgent.

"Hey, Elsa, look, I'm sorry, but look, I'm in my room now! Nothing is improper- well, nothing looks improper- well... Look, Elsa, I could tell you every detail, and you wouldn't really want to know, and I'll take the blame completely- because I trust Kristoff, and we are in love, and you do love and trust him too, because that's why you're arranging our wedding in the spring. And you can know how right you are about us... Elsa? You're... You look a bit... Are you okay?"

Elsa stares at her with a look, not of anger or betrayal, not even of shock- a strange detached look as if the sounds that Anna is making convey no meaning to her. She looks even paler than usual- her eyes look strangely _smaller_ , her face shadowed thin, something like sweat- possibly frozen- drifting across her skin- indescribably _not herself_. Wondering if it's time to call for medical help (not that physicians over the last couple of years have been able to make much sense of Elsa's idiosyncratic agues, but it feels better to share the confusion with those who can be confused in a more informed way) Anna comes closer.

Then she sees it. The flakes drifting across Elsa's face are- not. They're behind her, out of the window. Elsa is translucent.

A ghost.

Elsa's ghost.

But if Elsa's ghost is in here...

Anna's cries, screams, howling for it not to be so, bring footsteps running in the passageway- and the first to sail through the door is a Elsa- who, if not quite warm, is definitely herself, solid and, while always uncanny, definitely alive.

"Anna. Anna, wake up. Breathe, Anna. It's okay, Anna. Look at me. It's okay."

She sits limp and lets Elsa wrap her arms around her, hugging her as if getting her close enough would solve every problem. She could feel Elsa's heart hammering fast under her nightie, in spite of her soothing words. Shades of last year occurred to her, after  the thaw when they had both been troubled by bad dreams, so bad that they'd often huddled in one bed for comfort when one of them dreamed of blue light and endless cold, of warm blood and cold steel, of cold smirks and locked doors.

By the time Kristoff thunders in, Anna's just crying, and just now doesn't feel like trying to make sense of it all, so he picks her up, like he did on that day and puts her in her bed, where she looks down to see Olaf, who smiles gently at her.

 

"You've gotta start trusting your sister to be there in the morning," he says.

* * *

 

"A ghost," Kristoff says, as if she had just said 'a storm petrel' or 'a Jarlsberg cheese'.

Elsa, more satisfactorily, starts spending her tenuous free time in the same distant and disorganised shelves of the library that Papa used to haunt in an even more mysterious manner.

"I was never told everything he knew," she says. "I think he thought it wouldn't help me."

"What wouldn't?" Anna says, looking at the books that Elsa's handing down to her- old bindings of even older-looking vellums.

"I don't know. I'll know it when I find it." Elsa reaches along to a smaller volume, its pages discoloured to brown, that seems in grave danger of shedding pages. "Probably."


End file.
